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Why Business Continuity Should Be at the Top of Every CEO’s Worry List
Posted on April 2, 2019
The physical security of your office building or manufacturing plant, employees and customers is a primary concern for CEOs, but are you also considering the digital dangers that are lurking around every corner? It’s unusual for CEOs to dig down into the details of how a specific building in your organization is locked up tight: you just trust that your operations team has it under control because putting locks on a building for security is a known entity. Unfortunately, cybersecurity continues to morph dramatically over time, which is why business continuity provided by IT services in NJ should be one of the top priorities when you consider the long-term viability of your business.
The Hidden Costs of Downtime
The loss of productivity in a business can be invasive, starting in one tiny corner and radiating outward until it ultimately affects your bottom line. Small productivity losses are an expected part of doing business: phone systems can glitch, servers may need to be replaced at some point or the power goes out. While you can limit the impact on an annual basis, it’s completely unexpected downtime due to a cyber attack or natural disaster that can really put your business in a tailspin. You can see the majority of the costs associated with downtime such as lack of employee productivity and direct costs of repairing any problems that you’ve discovered. What you might be missing are the hidden costs, such as:
- Customers who are unable to access your website, and subsequently can’t place orders
- Vendor payments that are late, costing you overages on each invoice
- Time that IT professionals spend working on resolving issues
- Non-productive time after tasks, as teams refocus on their work
- Employee retention if the problem continues happening and takes an unexpectedly long time to resolve
According to Gartner, the cost of downtime is somewhere around $5,600 per minute, making it an extremely expensive day for your business! Larger organizations report that a single hour of downtime can cost their business between $1-3 million dollars — an astronomical sum for 60 simple minutes. This is one of the key reasons that business continuity should be at the top of every CEOs worry list.
Business Benefits of Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Getting your business back up and running at peak capacity is job one when you’re in an outage situation. With all IT hands on deck, your support structure can scramble and cause additional problems — including poor customer and business user experiences. Working with IT services in NJ often provides your internal technology teams with the support that they need to fully define a comprehensive business continuity solution that includes everything from strategies for getting your website back online to how to rebuild servers and relaunch phone systems after a disaster. Even a simple situation such as a power outage at a data center must be planned for, with multiple redundancies in disparate geographic locations being your best option for protecting your sensitive data and system applications.
Finding The Right Business Continuity Solution
Finding the right partner for IT services in NJ starts with finding a team that understands your business and your unique needs. Your partner should look for ways to bake resiliency into every process, providing alternate means of conducting business depending on the scale and scope of the emergency. Protecting your organization against cybercriminals is a massive responsibility, and one that shouldn’t solely rest with your CIO or IT services support team. Having involvement at the highest level of the organization allows you to more tightly refine requirements and ensure that all business needs are met during periods of high stress on the business. Your partner for IT services in NJ should offer:
- Robust security procedures to block attacks before they begin
- Active monitoring so you are quickly notified that an incident has occurred
- Detailed plans documenting the various steps and responsibilities for parties in your organization and for your partner
- A thorough understanding of the business continuity options in the marketplace
- Flexible support options that allow you to customize protection that will meet your needs
- Extensive testing schedule that will find any inconsistencies in your planning stages and help identify weak points that need to be shored up
- Regular maintenance review schedule, to ensure that your plan stays up-to-date to meet the changing needs of the organization
Ultimately, you need to know that your partner for IT services in NJ will be fully invested in the long-term success of your organization, and will be there when you need them to respond quickly and get your business back online.
Creating a Backup Isn’t Enough
Depending on your day-to-day involvement with technology, you may know that there are consistent backups in place and that your CIO has assured you that they’re on top of recovery procedures. Unfortunately, even the most robust backup procedures simply aren’t enough to get your business back online quickly in the face of a potentially catastrophic loss. Business continuity and disaster recovery planning go far beyond a simple backup. Without the peace of mind provided by the thoughtful approach to business continuity, the risk to your organization is very real and growing on a monthly basis. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly bold, as they’re able to successfully stage attacks on organizations of all sizes.
Without the support of a partner for your IT services in NJ, your business may be operating under the false assumption that you’re safe from the dangers that are hiding around every corner. Hackers are becoming increasingly adept at negotiating their way into your organization’s sensitive personal and financial data, while natural disasters are causing billions in damage on an annual basis. Recognizing this risk and taking steps to reduce it are crucial success factors for today’s CEOs.